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Sure, there are lots of exciting things to do here: surf, sail and hike trails, paraglide and parachute, jump in a shark cage and stare into an active volcano. During rush hour our freeway traffic can be as nerve-racking as the 405 in Los Angeles.

But No Drama Obama wants things as predictable and peaceful as can be when he brings FLOTUS and the First Kids to Honolulu on Friday. No wacky dictators with chemical weapons. No wacky Republicans trying to kill Obamacare. No wacky Obamacare website seeming to kill itself. Instead, the Obamas sequester themselves in Kailua, the quiet windward Oahu town where they rent a house each holiday season. He golfs. He works up a sweat at the gym. He eats a fancy meal or two. He barbecues with the same three friends he’s known for decades. When he goes to the beach, he does little more then get his feet wet. And he never has to worry about traffic jams; we clear the roads when and wherever he goes.

The president is likely to get the same predictably low-key welcome in his home state when he arrives for a 17-day vacation this winter, but it won’t come without a touch of wistfulness among the locals this time: It’s been a tough year for Hawaii’s native son. His popularity is at the lowest point yet. His signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, is in trouble. He can’t get immigration reform and gun control passed. And it seems everyone except Dick Cheney is mad the government got caught spying big time.

Even some Hawaiians are now wondering if Obama has lost a bit of his aloha spirit, as residents here—70 percent of whom voted for him in 2012—have watched his progressive second-term agenda meet one obstacle after another—including in Hawaii. The state’s health exchange launch was saddled by technical glitches, prompting its director to resign. And remember that the last time Edward Snowden worked for the National Security Agency—just this year, actually, before he fled to Moscow by way of Hong Kong—was on Oahu. Under Obama’s administration, the United States was also supposed to pivot from Europe and the Middle East to Asia and the Pacific, Hawaii’s backyard. That hasn’t quite worked out either.

Perhaps the more direct snub, though, is that Obama will probably not build his presidential library in the city where he was born and graduated from high school—Honolulu. Locals have not given up on having some sort of Obama center of study here, perhaps at the University of Hawaii or on oceanfront property in the capital. But for the official library all signs now point to Chicago, the president’s adopted hometown.

Hawaii is as blue as a state as there is, but Obama has always had his few detractors here. (One of them is my mother, Patricia, whom I would not be surprised to see roadside again next week in Kailua, holding signs to protest the government’s use of drones and treatment of Palestinians as Obama’s motorcade drives by.) Over the past year, though, there’s been more fodder than usual for Hawaii’s disillusioned faction.

“I think among progressives there is a great deal of frustration, and I think the frustration is with ourselves and others,” says Bart Dame, a longtime progressive Democrat activist in the state who grew up in Kailua. But Dame thinks part of the problem is simply high expectations. “My read on Obama is that people on the left looked at him when he was running and heard him say centrist things but looked at him being biracial and local, and we thought he was more left then he let on,” he explains. “The right wing looked at his biracial nature, too, and that fact that he grew up in Indonesia, and they thought that the guy was more left-wing than he was letting on. But he told us the truth: He was a centrist.”